I'm Chris and Liz is my wife(she's in the comments as well). We're so thrilled you got it working! I'm sorry it was corroded, as the note mentioned it was rescued from my office disposal so who knows how long it had been sitting before I found. We're so glad you gave it new life and that's pretty cool 😎

I feel a bit sorry for them in the sense that this was clearly a pretty good idea, but probably just too early (and too expensive by far) to really take off. It was a surprisingly forward-thinking product for a company like that to come out with.

This is one of those rare cases where a 90s gadget is actually extremely competent and does exactly what it intends to do. I'm seriously impressed. You could've said this came out last week and I'd still find it impressive. The way it works with regular paper and doesn't even need you to put 1 sheet on at a time is really cool.

Hey that's from me! Glad you were able to get it working! We thought it was the most weird and cool piece of tech. So fun seeing it in a video, especially the previous users writings!

Cool Crab is my favorite recurring LGR guest.

If this were being sold in 2023 I’d pick it up in a heartbeat. So many of my classes don’t allow taking notes on laptops and this would be a good solution for digitizing it after class so I can refer to them easier

It was nice seeing the Crosspad. I (as a software developer) had purchased one (at FULL price) and it was good for note-taking, but really worked well when diagramming new features and developing user stories for development. The searchable "Links" came in very handy for code reviews. It did have a purpose, and worked very well for me, saving quite a bit of time.

Now that seems super advanced for the time period. Massively cool!

My dad is a bit of a semi-pro artist and had wanted to get into computers back in the 60s so anything that combined art and computers he would give a try. He had owned a traditional digitizing tablet before but hated that the only visual feedback was on the screen. So, when he saw an ad for the Cross Pad he immediately ordered one thinking that it would have the fidelity of a primarily art tablet but with the immediate feedback of the ink on the page. He was picturing something akin to a Cintique, but with paper in place of the display, this was the 90s after all. He was immediately disappointed by the fact that the drawings did not show on screen in real time, and when you transferred a drawing over it had serious jaggy lines and the lack of pressure sensitivity meant that line width was not accounted for. He also had thought you could use any pen so toss in the lack of color and the ability to use different pens with different tips and his dreams were shattered. The tablet sat mostly unused, and when he did use it he would forget that he had to use the correct pen and he made an absolute mess of the thing when he would confuse it with his other one and try using it without paper installed. It looked like a middle-school desk covered in grafitti. He had set it up himself and, while he didn't forbid me from using it he was constantly worried about the "special paper" and the ink in the special pen... on the occasion he remembered either. Since I did not set it up, and he lost the manuals almost immediately, I only just found out in this video that the tablet was not a hard-wired device and it required batteries. I think he would have enjoyed it much more if he had realized he did not have to be tethered to the computer to use it and we wouldn't have thought he broke it when the batteries must have died in the tablet. We even went as far as replacing the pen, which we knew took batteries. I also never found the spare ink storage, that would have eased his mind about the ever so precious ink. All in all, I think he successfully made maybe 3-4 drawings using the tablet, none of which were ever taken into another program for refinement. I had no idea at the time that this was such an expensive bust. Not his most expensive, or oddest piece of hardware, but it is higher up the list than I ever imagined.

Everyone keeps saying this was amazing for its time. I would argue this is still amazing even in current time.

I’m currently a uni student; I’ve seen so many people use remarkable or handwriting on their iPads. This thing was just ahead of its time.

This seems like it would have been every pupil's best friend back then: Being able to take notes and have them all on the computer come exam time... They chose the wrong target group.

I worked for cross for several years, 2008-11. I worked in the HQ in lincoln ri and then ran a store in boston! this was before my time but i remember it being advertised when I was in college and wanted it so bad! I still love the idea, as an artist who draws and sells original sketches, this would have been a great way to draw and save my work simultaneously! nowadays there are better options out there, so in the past it remains. FYI, cross never got over that lawsuit. When i was there they hired this asshole CEO who got paid a lot of money to move all physical production to china while simultaneously carving up the sub departments and selling them off to competitors. by the time the great recession killed my store the company was a pretty toxic place to work. Still, I loved their pens and pencils and their rollerballs were the best in the business IMHO.

Oh man I remember seeing these at CompUSA at the time and wanting one so badly (for all those meeting notes I was taking when I was 13).

Radio guy here, willing to bet that the crosspad works by tracking where the pen is transmitting from using 2 or 3 antennas on the pad itself. The receiving antennas are performing angle of arrival (AoA) calculations on the pens signal when it's transmitting, giving us 3 angles the text could have came from. The point where these angles intersect (the 'fix') is calculated, giving us a position that can be put into a set of coordinates. Each coordinate is recorded at a fixed rate (the sample rate, think something like a framerate), giving you the path of the pen. That's my theory of how it works anyways.

Me and a friend went halfsies on I think it was the smaller one back around 1999 or 2000. She took notes in the college classes we took together and emailed them to me because my handwriting was horrible. It was an impressive device given the rough state of OCR on scanners. Can't remember how much it cost though, we both worked for Circuit City at the time and got stuff like that at cost.

I was a tech journalist in Tokyo back then and was so excited to have one of these that I brought it to every press conference or interview for a certain period. The first and foremost drawback was that the tip of the pen had an mechanical switch and it always “sink” by 1 to 1.5 mm travel, accompanied with annoying click sounds as you try to start writing something on paper. The price was reasonable for the kind of professions (imagine computer prices at that time) and I wish it could continue its life and fix those issues bit by bit.

Im really digging in the indepth techtails at the start of most oddware episodes

This makes me think it’s be awesome to so a video on what a 90s businessmen tech setup would look like. Wall Street style. Suit included.

This is amazing for the period. Wacom tablets might have already existed but this is something you could use in a meeting and not look like a total dork. Also, I assume the pen would have felt just like a normal one and you can see what you have written, just like a normal pen. Surprised it didn't get more success.

I remember working at Staples at that time and we were selling these. I don't remember any selling of them personally, but the concept was really interesting.

I could actually totally see this as being a great thing for our table top role play games group. I don't like to use laptops and tablets during play, pen and paper are what we rock. This would be a good way to get notes into a pc after to do a quick refresh of what happened.

Oh yeah, sold these at Staples... those that got it did seem to love it. Staples sold pretty fancy Cross pens that cost over a hundred dollars without any tech inside so $80 for a replacement was not too bad. They were so expensive, I had to cycle count cross pens weekly back then. I mostly remember trying hard not to buy it when it went down on clearance for like $29.99. I succeeded, so it's cool to see it fully in use now. Great Oddware!

My dad worked from home and had this. Or a device that worked exactly like this. I don't seem to remember his having that little lcd at the bottom but it was a long time ago so maybe it did. I just remember him showing me and I drew little comics on it when he would let me. It was really fun! My dad worked importing a lot of different metals from Asia and sometimes Europe. Mostly Aerospace grade aluminum. I mostly remember him using it to take notes while on phone calls and then he would be able to easily email the notes or whatever info he wrote down to whoever he needed to minutes after the phone call ended so he got a lot of use out of it. The only reason he stopped using it was he eventually stopped working from home after getting a higher position in the company and had a secretary. So instead of using the crosspad type device he just would give his notes to the secretary and then she would transcribe them and send them to whoever needed them.

That drawing transfered pretty well. And the drawing was good, too. :)

Wow, quite pleased with that transition from desk view to screen capture around 18:46. That was smooth.

While I don't generally use subtitles for LGR videos, I sometimes end up watching one with them left on from a previous video and I've gotta say, the random adjectives added to the [jazz music] captions are adorable.

Man, this is the first oddware thing that I in ironically would love to own, or a modern/reimagined version. Edit: the main appeal is that you are actually drawing on paper with the full tactile experience that comes with being on paper

I seem to remember that 9 volt batteries are typically just little boxes holding several AAAA batteries in series. Not sure how common that is these days. But I recall that being true at one point in time

I really miss watching computer chronicles back in the day. As well as ZDTV programs like The Screensavers, Call For Help, and Fresh Gear. Simple days but fun days.

This seems 15+ years ahead of its time. I'm blown away. 😲

I love the music you use in your videos; it suits the nostalgia of the tech and the sound of your voice so well.

I remember wanting this SOOOOO badly as a kid who was ALWAYS drawing. I drew on EVERYTHING and was always in trouble with my teachers for drawing and "not paying attention." (I was, I start to daydream if I'm forced to just sit there and listen, and this was my right-brained way of focusing my childhood energy.) I remember just getting access to a scanner to scan my drawings was always a chore, and often I drew something in a traditionally-bound sketchbook so it was next to impossible to get the sketchbook to lie flat on the scanner bed, and you'd get a gigantic gray fade mark across the whole page when scanned. If somebody would have bought me one of these as a kid I would have used the ever living daylights out of it!

Moleskine introduced "Smart Notebook" last year that seems to be modern version of this product. Very expensive but works great.

Your quest to find an AAAA battery reminds me so much of when I was trying to find one for my Surface pen. They're damn hard to find, but eventually I found some at a hardware store of all places.

I am a tutor, and I think something like this would be great for testing students' times tables and other things. I could write a program that knows where each answer is on the pad and use it to determine which questions the student student stumbled, so I can give them targeted practice.

this is what I tune in to oddware for. My first drawing tablet in 2007 had a flap on top you could slide a paper under and trace it.. I quickly realized though, angle matters. you can be touching the line on the paper, but that doesn't matter, because the transmitter is not literally right at the tip. like an eye with astigmatism, if you tilt it even slightly, it won't line up anymore with the tablet's 'retina' the same way.

So cool to see old notes upload like clockwork after a quarter century!

Seeing Computer Chronicles in an episode of LGR is so fitting, full circle if you will.

I vaguely remember seeing a similar product decades ago in a store. The one I saw, however, used special paper with a grid of dots on it or something like that. This CrossPad did have its downsides, but at least it didn't use proprietary paper which would have been a really bad thing.

Lenovo Yoga Book from 2016 has similar functionality. You can draw on one side (a pad that can turn into a keyboard), even on paper, and it will digitize drawing or writing. It was pretty good for taking notes or sketching.

Clint, your music and sound is always on point. Keep crafting magic sir.

I often have to measure floorplans and this tablet would have been perfect. Nowadays I use an Ipad to do the same- but that is not less expensive at all.

I actually miss some of the things that were out in the newly digital age.

If it had a backlight it would be great for tracing/digitising stuff.

Back around 1981 I bought a couple of X-PADs for my Radio Shack Color Computers. These things were great. It was a tablet. You could put paper on it. There was a sensor that could detect the pen distance from the pad as well as a switch that detected when the pen touched the pad or when it was pressed against the pad. These things were great. I still have and use both of them. You should try to do an episode on them. They were never really supported by much software... We mostly wrote our own and some third party Mac paint clones supported them. Because of this they were eventually replaced by the koala pad which plugged into the joystick port, was much more limited but better supported...

I was installing windows 98 while and this guy showed up I’m hooked from today

This is super neat. I would have loved having this. Heck, I would use it now.

This is the most '90s, fiddly, clunky thing ever. It's so close to being useful while being a total PITA. Love. It.

I got something like this in 2018 for university coursework. The Wacom Bamboo Slate in A5 (A4 would have been better, but I went with A5 because it was cheaper at the time). It connects via bluetooth to an app and was so useful during the pandemic for me when revusing with fruends because I could share what I wrote live through screen sharing.

I was recently thinking back when i first saw devices like that and thought to myself "damn i wish something usable like this was still around". I'm an electrician, doing repair work and upgrades to existing systems. Scribbling down a few numbers here, a schematic there, plus a BoM for the next week and so on. But loose paper gets lost a lot and keeping it on the notebook makes things rather chaotic in no time. Being able to archive all the things on the go, maybe even upload it to my home server would be a nice relief.

Impressive for today, amazing back in the day. There is also a PDA version made by Seiko.

I've seen this in the Netherlands on a digital fair and a couple of years later a company aimed at elderly people sold a product that connected to the internet and enabled them to write an e-mail just by writing on the pad. It was less ambitious in a way because there was no OCR going on, it just sent the picture as a graphics file. I offered to buy one for my favourite granny, but she did not want the subscription to an internet company, so that was that. Visiting her was always a great experience, so for our contact it was probably the best.

I had a Logitech version of this. It had DRM paper with little dots on it that transferred the writing to vector strokes

one of my professors in college used one of those optical pens that would record what was written to pdf. definitely a very useful resource for lectures.

That translucent mouse is absolutely fantastic.

Man it's often so sad hearing how unfortunate the stories of these different oddware episode devices ended up being. A lot of them are genuinely cool ideas that simply came out at a wrong time period where the technology wasn't quite there to unleash the full potential Like this inkpad - give it some extended capabilities, wireless connectivity to easily sync your notes with cloud storage or just transfer from the device, a built-in battery for both the pen and the tablet, and I guarantee you today this would be a fantastic albeit a little niche product. Especially if for example you could use an eraser and modify the notes on the fly without having to change the page and resync every time you make a small addition or correction to the already completed note/drawing

I had a CrossPad XP! I got it after it was discounted and used for school, but I don’t remember using it that much. It was a bit thick and bulky for daily use. But it did work “as advertised” to digitize notes.

Another fantastic odd ware video! I love all your content and appreciate your hard work, Clint!

That device seems like a useful device, especially back at the time it came out and I would have loved to have had one then, had I known about it at the time. I never actually knew there was AAAA batteries until you showed the pen takes them as I have never heard of or seen those types of batteries before. It amazes me a company selling writing stationary is still going 177 years after it was founded and only branching into also selling things like watches, cufflinks, pen cases and a few other things besides writing implements.

This is a product I could definitely use today. Out of all the weird 90s stuff this is probably the most useful thing I’ve seen!

I love how cool crab has pretty much become the mascot of this channel!

My mum bought something like this when I was young! Probably 10-15 years ago. It was a little device you clip onto the top of your paper and it stores your notes/drawings into the device, which you then transfer to your computer with a USB cable

I remember seeing a demo for this back at the Atlanta MicroCenter in the 90s. I was ecstatic about it, wanting to turn my drawings into digital art without a scanner (which at the time was hand-held and had to be dragged across the art). This lives in my memories, and I constantly wish I had gotten to take one home.

Man the blue hue in the blackground along with your shirt look sooo clean and good. Very visually satisfying

Something like this would have really been useful while I was in school. Especially for math, science, and engineering work. I still have all my notes from then just because they're very useful to have. Takes up a lot of space though. Having exact digital copies would have been nice.

Your videos are peaceful, man (im drinking), but I love and watch all ur videos for years. You're a staple in my youtube life; always there, always chill. Love to see your face.

This video reminded me of a mousepad I was given by a company. It was a pad of paper. There was no holder, it was just paper. You could write on the mouse pad then rip off the sheet. It functioned extremely well.

I had no idea Clint was this good at drawing. That crab looks great

Nice so this is where Wacom got their idea with the Wacom Folio and Bamboo slate, truly an oddware indeed.

Growing up my gran had something similar I.e. a pen that digitised whatever you wrote/drew, but it was completely standalone just a slightly chunky pen and then a dock to transfer the files to a PC. She used to use it for meetings and sometimes for art it was super cool tbh.

This would be great for note taking in classes if it also properly recognizes your writing.

As someone who hates writing on anything other than real paper, I think there's still absolutely a market for this. IMO a modern version would be: * Smaller, rechargeable, and bluetooth * Adjustable to accommodate different pad sizes * Live input like a wacom tablet

I'd say the modern equivalent for this would be the Rocketbook, which has reusable pages that you'd use with a pen with ink that wipes off. You would then take a photo of the page on your smartphone in the dedicated app and it would upload the photo to the cloud service of your choosing.

My teen is an artist, and would absolutely love one of these! It's a real shame they don't seem to be obtainable anymore. Amazon has a review for one, but there aren't even any Ebay listings for them. We would happily buy it off you!

This evolved into those cheapo digitizing pens you can buy on Amazon. They have onboard storage and upload to pc via Bluetooth. They work surprisingly well although lack the paper holder/tablet bit as its not needed.

Other than the packaging and screenshots of the software, the pad itself looks incredibly sleek and modern for late-90s. I could easily see this still being on store shelves with slightly updated packaging. I'm not surprised at all that this didn't succeed though. Even modern smart writing pads seem just bizarrely unnecessary and confusing, so I can only imagine how confounding this must've been to the average person when it was new.

Wow. I'm a 90s kid and I had never even heard of or seen this neat little device. Really cool, especially considering when it came out!

I had a similar device as a kid in the late 00s. Instead of the tablet it was all built into the pen itself, and you had to use special paper with some kind of grid system that the pen recognized. Was really nifty at the time. It had a built in speaker, so you could draw a keyboard on the paper, tap the keys to play a note. Draw a math problem and it would give you the answer. I think there was even a "battleship" mode where you could draw your ships on a grid and then the pen would tell you if you hit or miss. Built in spell check.. the list goes on. Was my favorite christmas gift the year i got it, thanks for reminding me of that. :)

To be totally honest, I'm a real stickler for texture on my drawings as I work, I'd consider buying one of these

Haven't watched your videos for a long time for some reason. Glad to have stumbled upon you again, Clint. You look great! Time to binge watch everything I have missed.

In all fairness, OCR today still seems to strike out so much where typing something out is almost always the better option. After giving up on trying to get the device to output searchable, editable text files, I think I'd still find value in at least having digital backups of notes

Who knew Clint was a bit of an artist? Cool Crab approves!

i had a similar item as this that i got in the mid 2000s. i think it actually came from aldi. mine also worked as a basic graphics tablet and thats all i ever used it for

The screenless predecessor to iPad or the Wacom tablets! This would’ve been good for illustrators and animators at the time!

Clint, you’re an artist!

I'm a boring business person in the future year of 2023 and I want this.

I have such a device from Bamboo. It works the same but transfers via Bluetooth to pc or phone. Very handy!

Howdy. I was one of the product/channel managers for the CrossPad. I have an unreleased v2 hardware and a mini. Since they were both prototypes there is no packaging. We were about to release the next software that allowed you to use vector file formats instead of just bitmap.

Amazing idea, I'm surprised it didn't do better. I would buy one even today.

Awesome video! I live for this type of stuff. My dad was very into being early on tech stuff and so while we didn't have this, we had tons of oddware type devices from this era around the house when I was growing up. I love seeing similar products documented with the great presentation you always have.

Oddware is back baby! Thank you Clint. This is my favorite series.

Love the nostalgia Clint! Takes me back to my childhood in the 90s. Oh what a time to be alive! with all of the new home electronic gizmos.

21:53 I LOVE the "Boring Business People" pictures timed to each word...especially the 2nd one...what Forgotten Machines are those Boring Business People posing in front of there? We will find out...but Another AWESOME LRR Oddware video Clint! Always LOVE to watch these, more entertaining than darn near anything on KZfaq or Amazon combined...seriously! Just when you thought your videos couldn't get any better...you up the bar...love it!

Another great video, Clint! Man that is a sexy keyboard you have for your pc

Hey! Love your work man. Always look forward to your videos about goofy old computer stuff

This brings back so many memories of all the weird office gadgets that were available in the 90s. I don't know how many stupid things like this I bought thinking it would revolutionize my life, only to toss it in the bin of lost toys a few months later. This was back in the "good" ole days when we had to train our voice and hand recognition software repeatedly so it could get about 80-90% of things right. It was all a gimmick but we believed some day it would be amazing. Today my stupid iphone translates my voice texts to obscenities and every call center is a robot with an attitude. Progress.

Such cool wonders from the 90s. They were such a neat time period! Glad I was born in 90!

I honestly dont care what your videos are about, i just like hearing you talk about stuff

when I see the Cool Crab in the video preview I know it means that the video should stand up even higher to the high expectations